Recent Comments

About

Owner of PageF30.com.
Translator of Demian by Hermann Hesse into English - an interlinear translation for German students and those who want to see the original text.
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/mithradates
Fluent in Japanese, Korean. Proficient in Mandarin, Turkish, German, French, Portuguese, others.

Sunday, May 17, 2009

A few days after some info on electric vehicles including scooters in Korea, CNN has an article on an electric motorcycle/scooter in the US called the Vectrix VX-1 that is worth a read. This vehicle is already available and though it costs quite a bit ($8,000), it's still quite a bit cheaper than even the cheapest electric car and if you're really itching to get an electric vehicle and live in a fairly warm part of the country you might want to get one of these. In fact, there were quite a few articles last year when the price of gas skyrocketed about commuters exchanging their cars for motorcycles or scooters in order to save money, and with this vehicle you also get savings beyond that in using electricity instead of gas, plus the ability to recharge the vehicle at home which lowers the commute time there as well. This VX-1 has a carbon footprint of 36 g/km, which is ten times less than that of a car.

The range is still somewhat limited (80 km) and the top speed is just below 100 kph, so it's more of a commuter's motorcycle than anything else...although the article does mention near the bottom that Shapiro (the customer featured in the article) has a bit of a plan to take the vehicle across the country on a road trip by stopping at people's houses for an hour or two each time it recharges, and to hopefully make a documentary out of that.

Norway's Think also gets a mention in the article too when talking about the price of other electric vehicles and how they are expected to go down in the next year or so.

The most detailed video on YouTube showing how the VX-1 works in practice is actually in Spanish, and starts 35 seconds into the video after the lame electricity joke.